Migration, settlement, marriage and household formation were processes central to the social structure of the district's population during the later middle ages. Propensity to move or marry, and the ages at which people did so, were personal demographic experiences that differed among different social or occupational groups in the Essex countryside. And the objective measures of these demographic experiences that are available from the district constitute the least ambiguous indices by which late-medieval Essex countryfolk mirrored the lives of their early-modern counterparts.

Marriage was a process with many legal and qualitative or experiential implications. Most importantly from the demographic perspective, it represented the inception of a new household, and thus the accumulation of the material means that made neolocal marriage possible. But in a rural society marked by persistent disparity between richer and poorer at village level, nuptiality varied between occupational subgroups. And so for agriculturalists, marriage was an experience likely to occur earlier in life, or more likely to occur at all, than was the case for craftsmen and retailers, and the differences between agriculturalists and labourers in these respects were even more marked. In short, for all people in the district nuptiality was linked with living standards, while still generally falling, as closely as the available evidence allows one to observe, within the realm of what historical demographers term the ‘Northwestern European marriage pattern’.

Only a minority of people in the Essex countryside at the end of the middle ages spent their entire lives residing in a single parish.